Not a Hero
So YouTube did another thing. I'm not going to make another video because I'm still in pain, but I thought that I'd talk about this YouTube Heroes thing. Here's the ad: link I keep thinking that YouTube hits the bottom, but I must admit that I'm impressed because they continually find new creative ways to dig deeper. So, let's talk about YouTube Heroes. "You work hard to make YouTube great for everyone" - it doesn't talk about the YouTube content creators. Notice the guy with a flag in his hand? Yeah, that's who they're talking about. They're talking about people who haphazardly flag content that they don't like. And spoilers, but that's going to be the main problem with this. "Gain points when you add subtitles to a video" Ooh points, I know what I'm doing today. I'm going to find random videos, start captioning them with "higgle figgle bligssdfesa rdarfsad gdgsaes vgvea afdadsfas." Can I have my points now? "points when you report negative comments" How many comments are in this page? Ooh, 12,000! Time to report them all to get lots of points. We've all been wondering if YouTube is staffed with people, but now it's clear to me that like some broken AI they don't even know how people work. When you gamify or incentivize these kinds of behaviors, people are probably going to do that more than they should. They'll start targeting neutral comments and what not in order to get their goddamn points. But then again, points are useless without rewards. So... what are the rewards? Level 1 is just about "becoming a hero" or whatever. Level 2 is... continue your training? With private exclusive workshops. Considering that people have to get that far by flagging and reporting content, that doesn't... sound very uplifting. But level 3 is where things... really start to bug me. Like... they get really bad. "Gain access to new tools. Mass flag videos." Hey YouTube, did you know that mass flagging of people that others don't like has been one of the biggest problems on this website since the beginning? And now, not only are you encouraging that behavior, you're giving people tools to do just that. All you need to do is over-flag to get the points. I can't see how this could possibly go wrong. Unless you don't take action against these videos, and you're just lying to these people you call heroes. "Help moderate community content." Wait a minute, YouTube... you have the ability to make people moderators? So... what, can they delete comments on other people's videos? Do they have further flagging abilities? Here's another question. If this is possible to do, why can't I hire my own moderators on my own content? That would be an awesome feature. "At level 4... you get to contact YouTube staff directly" Okay, so you don't get to contact YouTube directly by making more content for this content-based website no matter how long you do it or how successful you get at it. You get to contact YouTube by making sure that there's less content. "YouTube Heroes deserve a little glory" So, a YouTube hero is not someone who finds ways to talk people out of suicide, but now someone who flags that very video for not being advertiser friendly. Alright then. ------- What's the worst thing that could happen here? Well... a lot of things. Someone starts flagging criticism on their own channel. Not just outright trolling, but criticism. They're given points. This can let them mass flag videos, like any response video made to them. Giving them more points, allowing them to talk to YouTube directly to figure out ways to make this more effective. YouTube is incentivizing bad behavior. Another thing is that this might form an arms race between certain YouTubers. Why wouldn't someone use these features against anyone that they consider a competitor? This could certainly break up communities for the mere sake of going down the twitter trust & safety council. This is what demanding things like political correctness does, by the way. It allows people with bad intentions to censor ideas, people, and opinions they don't like. "Oh... but YouTube certainly won't lump criticism in with trolling..." which is why YouTube disabled the comments on this particular video. What do you think they got more of? Trolling, or criticism? There really is no way to tell because it's all gone. ------ I just realized that this is an animation. Maybe I will talk about this in the future. Along with several other terrible animated ads, like that weird Lucky Charms rap. I wonder if that would be considered "advertiser friendly". Category:Miscellaneous